Story

I'm a CS student at PES University and over the last few months I built Pulse, a free API uptime monitor. I wanted to share what I built and genuinely ask for advice on distribution because I'm stuck.

I wasn't happy with how existing free monitors handle incidents. They tell you something is down but give you nothing to debug with. So I focused on making Pulse actually useful after an alert fires.

What I built:

Root cause analysis — breaks every failed request into DNS lookup, TCP connect, TLS handshake, and TTFB stages, compares each against the historical baseline, and tells you which stage failed with a confidence score and plain-English suggestion.

Health scoring — 0-100 score per monitor based on uptime, response time trends, and variance. Lets you see degradation happening before actual downtime.

Anomaly detection — warns when response time is consistently 2x the 7-day baseline across 3 consecutive pings.

Auto incident reports — generates a post-mortem after every recovery with timeline, response time comparison, and impact estimate.

Rich alerts — Discord, Slack, and push notifications include status code, response time at failure, and a direct link to the incident.

All free, 5 monitors, no credit card.

The problem: I've posted on Reddit but my account keeps getting filtered. I have zero users outside of people I know personally. I don't have a marketing budget and I'm not sure where developers who actually care about monitoring hang out.

Specific questions I'm stuck on: - Is the root cause analysis angle actually a meaningful differentiator or is it a nice-to-have? - Where would you go to find devops engineers or backend developers who would genuinely care about this? - Is free-with-Pro-coming the right model or does free just attract people who will never pay?

Any honest feedback appreciated, including if the product itself has obvious problems I'm not seeing. Link to my project in my about me, or just ask in comments :).